At the time, that $1 billion claim was hard to believe, and parsing what Curt Anderson, the then-CFO of Microsoft’s Server and Tools unit, told Bloomberg, was (and still is) interesting:

“Microsoft’s $1 billion sales figure includes Azure, as well as software provided to partners to create related Windows cloud services, Anderson said in an interview. Azure customers use the services to run corporate programs, websites and applications from Microsoft’s data centers, rather than spending on their own servers, storage machines and workers to maintain them.”

The emphasis was mine.

Cloud confusopoly (hat tip to Scott Adams)

So, let’s be clear about a very fuzzy topic. None — and I mean not one –of the cloud providers make it easy to suss out exactly how big their cloud businesses are. Amazon doesn’t break out Amazon Web Services separately, as we are all sick and tired of pointing out. You have to sort of divine AWS’s relative size by assessing Amazon’s “Net Sales, North America, Other” category. So much for transparency.

Still, no one knows the answer. And that lack of insight won’t get better any time soon.

There’s a great Dilbert “Confusopoly” cartoon on this topic, as a Twitter correspondent pointed out last week. I don’t have rights to reproduce it here, but here is a link. As people in the IT business have long known, there is margin potential in confusion. So it’s not in any vendor’s best interest to make things clearer.